When Messori published his first book, Hypotheses about Jesus, which immediately became a worldwide bestseller, many urged him to also write “hypotheses about Mary.” The proposal was accepted almost thirty years later, in 2005, and again the author’s effort has been rewarded with foreign translations, numerous reprints up to the new present edition. Years of work have resulted in a volume of more than sixty chapters that can be read on their own rather than as a unicum. The result is lively and “colorful”: dogma combines with anecdote, biblical exegesis with apparitions, spirituality with history, theology with mystery. Scholars, men of letters, seers and mystics, pilgrims, miraculously-healed peole, saints and sinners, inquisitors and heresiarchs, emperors and peasants intersect. It is a sorprendent overview of an often secret world, which the author approaches as a confessed devotee, allergic, however, to the honeyed rhetoric of certain devotionalism. These pages are both rigorous and informative. They are the outcome – as always – of the liveliness and clarity of the great journalist combined with the solidity of the up-to-date scholar, with relentless documentation.